Life before Stonehenge: exploring environmental evidence from Blick Mead

Archaeological discoveries from Blick Mead, a Mesolithic ‘home base’ located beside a spring c.2.5km from Stonehenge, have been revelatory, uncovering extensive evidence of hunter-gatherer communities coming together to create thousands of flint tools and to share elaborate feasts (see CA 325, 324, and 271). Until recently, however, analyses of the site’s sediments indicated that preservation of environmental evidence within them was poor. Any chance of relating Blick Mead’s long and detailed radiocarbon date sequence for occupation (spanning c.8000-3600 BC, it is unique for north-western Europe) to evidence for how the landscape looked and changed across those four millennia was see